My relationship to Art
I’ve always found myself fascinated with art and my own inner contemplation of trying to understand beauty.
Starting at 13, I learned how to play bass guitar, electric guitar, some piano and Violin (within school context). I played religiously for at least a couple of hours each day, and that lasted until I was about 20 or so. Since then, I play infrequently, but my love for music has remained. I’ve enjoyed classic rock, progressive rock, classical music, indie rock/pop, and more recently, folk music, to name a few.
Around the same time I stopped playing music regularly, I took up Philosophy as my main hobby. I read through most of the great works by Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, and Schopenhauer, to name the most influential to me. My mind became consumed with the idea that philosophy can help us understand and interpret the world around us and allow us to navigate it effectively.
Aesthetics
It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the field of thought known as Aesthetics. Perfectly combining my love for beauty (all things art and mostly music), as well as rational thought (philosophy). It is impossible to go fully into the ideas around this topic, but I would like to explore why art is important and what kind of meaning it can provide us.
Aesthetics is the study of beauty and all things beautiful. Humans seek out beauty, and some attempt to create beautiful works. The reason we admire beauty so profoundly is partially due to our limited and finite existence and what it can do to help us alleviate the pains and burdens of living. There is no man or woman that can live without a form of beauty or art in their lives. Life is full of horrible and unfair experiences and as good as we can, we try to prevent them with modern science and technology, but there is always a gap that needs to be filled with beauty for us to persevere.
Meaning through Art
We have all experienced a song, painting, a view from the top of a mountain, or some other form of art/beauty that made us feel awe. There is a concept within aesthetics known as “the sublime” which can be summarized as something like “delightful horror”. Something so immensely beautiful that it makes us fear or own mortal existence and feel small, and yet be overwhelmed by appreciation of its existence. It’s impossible to do this concept justice because it is a very difficult idea to get across through words alone.
We seek beauty and art because it gives our lives meaning and opens up a window into ideas that our minds haven’t explored. A couple of lines from a poem can encapsulate the idea that if written in a statement would take many paragraphs or pages. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is another example of the idea that art has the ability to speak to us from a deeper place than our minds currently inhabit.
Art allows us to gaze into the transcendent to understand fundamental truths about existence and bring us to peace with them. Beauty and art help us expand our modes of interpreting the world around us and our place within it. A life without beauty would be stagnant and bleak.
Valuing beauty
How can we assign value to something that is intangible and immeasurable, and yet so profoundly important to our lives? I’m not going to pretend to understand why certain paintings or pieces of music are timeless and considered “masterpieces” while most others are forgotten in time. I imagine it has something to do with when I mentioned art being a portal into the transcendent and fundamental truths, and that these ideas are inherent among all people on a very deep level.
Can we put a price tag on a painting like the Mona Lisa? If we truly see these things as priceless works, then what does it say for the pursuit of art and beauty? How can we value time spent on these endeavors? Standing on top of a mountain and gazing at the vista before you and what nature has to offer is an unparalleled experience that almost every human finds some delight in; yet we can’t measure the value it provides us in any practical terms.
How I have changed my view on Art
I would’ve said, up until 2 years ago, that any time spent listening to music, watching movies, playing a video game, or staring at a painting, would be considered a bad use of my time. Not necessarily a waste, but that the time spent could’ve been better suited to building something that helps us materially and practically. It’s easy to understand how building ourselves a house can make our life better, but it’s mush less easy to see how a piece of music or a painting makes our life better.
I fall prey to being cynical about “wasting time” consuming art, even though I have a deep passion for creating it and admiring it overall. I have been attempting to be more relaxed and let myself enjoy the beauty that nature and art have to offer me and allow it to transform my understanding of the world.
If anyone else is interested in exploring these ideas deeper with me, I would be more than willing to discuss them.